Wild Speculation
Wired has been offering some of the best alternate energy news around. Their latest, Why $5 Gas Is Good for America:
At the climax of his book Twilight in the Desert, Houston investment banker and energy guru Matthew Simmons describes a visit to the world’s most powerful oil company, Saudi Aramco, in Dhahran. Simmons listens in horror as a senior manager reveals the kingdom’s darkest secret. The old ways no longer suffice. To keep their aging wells productive, the Saudis now rely upon one information age prop after another: advanced analysis of rock cores, 3-D seismic imagery, software for diagnosing underground oil flows – all integrated using something called fuzzy logic. Fuzzy logic? The Aramco man tries to explain the science of complex systems and partial information, but Simmons hears only tidings of a bleak future. Obviously, the end of energy as we know it is nigh…
[actually, Simmons is probably right about the possibility that easy-to-produce oil is peaking - but he may be wrong about the consequences. It looks like high prices may finally be waking up the previously sluggish alternative fuels market.]
…We’ve never had more options for keeping those wheels turning. Aramco’s fuzzy logic is just one of a multitude of new tools and fuels – some proven, some in the works, and some wildly speculative. The main thing standing between those possibilities and your gas tank is cheap crude oil that costs Aramco barely $3 a barrel to bring to the surface.
So rising oil prices are more than just an irritant or even an ominous nick out of the GDP. They’re an invitation to corn and coal and hydrogen. For anyone with a fresh idea, expensive oil is as good as a subsidy – with no political strings attached. Indeed, every extra penny you pay at the pump is an incentive for some aspiring energy mogul to find another fuel…
In related news, even the CIA is going green.